Family running and riding to fight autism

Wednesday

Corinne Duggan and Matt Coates are starting their life together by running together — for a great cause and a special family member.

Corinne Duggan and Matt Coates are starting their life together by running together — for a great cause and a special family member.

Duggan and Coates ran in the Boston Marathon last month as representatives for Children’s Hospital Boston’s autism language program. Duggan’s 19-year-old cousin, Michael, has autism, and his mother, Marie Duggan, has volunteered and worked for the program, as well as on behalf of other autism-spectrum causes in the city.

“Children’s is a great program anyway, so it’s not hard to find motivation, but [it’s great] to be able to do it for my own family,” Corinne Duggan said. “We saw an opportunity, and [thought] we might as well raise money for a charity [benefiting] people you love.”

“To do this for her cousin, it meant so much to my whole family,” said Marie Duggan of Roslindale. “It’s great to have people run, but to have your own family run for your own child makes a strong statement.”

Duggan and Coates met at a party in late 2006, shortly after Coates moved to the United States from the United Kingdom. They got engaged in Sydney during Easter this year, and are planning a November wedding. They moved from South Boston to Roslindale in March.

Duggan said that running a marathon was on her “to-do list,” and Coates was in the habit of training for endurance events by regularly practicing rowing for several hours per day.

So when Marie Duggan offered them running numbers from Children’s Hospital Boston, they jumped at the chance.

“I remember it was always kind of a difficult situation because communication was a huge difficulty [for Michael],” Corinne Duggan said.

According to Marie Duggan, one in 150 children is now diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

Coates said that he didn’t know much about autism at the time, but threw himself wholeheartedly into learning more, and was startled to see how many individuals the condition affects.

“There’s a staggering number of children afflicted with something we don’t understand yet,” he said. “Children’s does a lot of research to uncover the causes and, hopefully, in the future, [might find] an understanding of how we might be able to prevent it.”

What’s more, Coates said, “the autism program helped Mike to be able to communicate in a way that I don’t think would have been possible without the program.”

On the day of the Marathon, Corinne Duggan and Coates were touched to meet other runners — some of whom had never met Michael — wearing shirts proclaiming that they, too, were running on his behalf.

“Standing there, waiting to start, and being able to tell them about my cousin Mike was great,” Corinne Duggan said.

She completed the Marathon in 4 hours and 53 minutes; Coates in 4:54.

“Corinne would have been 4:20 if she wasn’t carrying me to the end,” Coates said with a laugh.

“It was absolutely wonderful for them to run for Mike, as well as having other runners who ran for Mike,” Marie Duggan said. “For them to take on 26.2 miles … it’s no easy feat for anyone.”

Marie Duggan and others from the program watched the marathoners from Chestnut Hill and cheered as her family members ran past.

Marie Duggan appreciated “being able to show Mike pictures of them and say, ‘you’re in school because of people like this’ … it brings tears to my eyes.”

Corinne Duggan has raised $1,500 for Children’s; Coates has amassed close to $2,000. They are both aiming to raise at least $3,000. So far, they’ve held a fundraiser at Boston Beer Works in South Boston and asked many family and friends to contribute.

Last year, runners raised $53,000 toward the autism language program, Marie Duggan said. This year, the hospital allocated 10 numbers, and the runners have already brought in close to $50,000.

Two weekends ago, Marie Duggan — who worked closely with Mayor Thomas Menino on last month’s first-ever City of Boston Autism Summit — helped plan a motorcycle ride for autism awareness that ended in West Roxbury with a family fun day and other fundraising events at Millennium Park.

It also included tours of the model autism program at the West Roxbury Education Complex. “It’s the only program in Boston using all of the technology for adolescents,” Marie Duggan said. “We’ve been able to develop our own software to teach kids on the autism spectrum how to communicate and comprehend language. It’s been huge.”

Having enjoyed the first experience so much, Corinne Duggan and Coates are now considering future travels in order to run in marathons all over the world.

“One of the things we loved about the Boston Marathon is that we got to see the city and Massachusetts from a whole different perspective,” Duggan said.